1. Tablemount
The weight of the atmosphere pressed the night down on the ocean. The air above the black water was pinned under a murky dome of heavy cloud, held down like a dying songbird gripped in the claws of some great hunting feline. The weight compressed the air to complete stillness, flattening the water until it was unable to raise more than a barely perceptible heave, forced up from the hidden reserves of power somewhere deep below the glassy surface.
A distant moon — cast out by the atmosphere and not visible — dimly lit the clouds to the color of the charred edges of a coal. The moon reclined, above and beyond, unable to muster enough warmth to intervene with the iron grip of the atmospheric pressure. It merely stood by helplessly, feebly attempting to stir the ocean out from under the strong arm of the atmosphere by the force of tide. It was all it could do to provide even the coldest, dimmest light. That light filtered down through layer upon layer of gray cloud until it was so diluted and refracted that it left the sky only a few shades of black lighter than the water.
The ocean below was unquestionably black. The blackness had risen up from the deep. Out beyond the atmosphere rode heavenly bodies that radiated light and heat, and the thick gasses of the atmosphere carried some portion of that warmth down to the surface. But in the deep there is darkness and cold, and the viscous liquid transported that darkness up to the surface, carried on vast swells of cold. As hard as the atmosphere might press down, the darkness yielded not at all to the pressure above.
The boundary where the black water met the pale air stretched from horizon to horizon along the cupped edge of the dome of cloud, without referent or feature. Until a point arose. A point like the first push of a needle through the underside of a new piece of fabric, the workings of which would soon bond the fabric to another with hundreds of interwoven and gradually tightening stitches. The point rose, a long thin wire extruded up, piercing through the surface. A weak V-shaped wake trailed behind it in the water, marking its course. The tip of the wire wavered in the thick air, describing great arcane gestures that were transmitted up its length and amplified from the chaos of forces afflicting its still-submerged lower reaches.
The base of the wire emerged, mounted atop a short mast that followed the wire up through the surface, and soon after accompanied by a series of a half dozen or so other masts, each adding a new wake behind it. The line of wakes carved up the black surface behind the path of the masts with their nested Vs. For a minute they moved alone on the surface, and the Vs grew longer and longer, stretching out behind in a subtle but ever-widening trail.
A black oblong pushed through the surface and rose into the air. Water streamed across the flat top and down the smooth metal sides of the oblong. It grew upwards, like a rising column of soot from a factory, and became a curved vertical wall. It thrust up against the pressure of the atmosphere just as seismic forces raised up a new continent. Water shot in streams from vents in the side of the walls, draining out interior voids that had been filled while submerged. The curved wall sprouted up from a giant body at its base, which now broke through the surface, lifting the wall farther into the air above. An enormous flat deck was called into existence along the top of the body, appearing in a long line ahead of the curved wall of the oblong. The sea water washed back and forth across the deck, the pressure of the atmosphere finally yielding to irresistible forces generated by a machine made by humans. Water ran from the deck and down the curved sides of the body which contained huge tanks that moments before had been filled with water. Now buoyant air displaced the water, raising the deck upwards. The surface of the black ocean gave before the breach of this leviathan, and a wake of dull gray broke out behind it.
At first its movement was nearly silent, other than the sound of the water running along its sides and the soft crash of the curling wake left behind. Then it coughed, spat, and from two pipes that opened at the top of its oblong dorsal fin two arcs of flame burst orange into the surrounding night, spraying apocalyptic color across the landscape of pitch. The flames flashed over the reflective blackness of the water and bounced back from the low clouds, and then died back into the dens from which they came. They left behind the rolling churn of exploding diesel and hot air pouring up through the pipes and forcing open the shutters that normally protected them from the influx of water.
The engines of the machine revved up and then maintained a loud high pitch, generating the energy to drive it forward through controlled and contained combustion trailed by blowing heat. The surfaced submarine accelerated, reached, and maintained an unvarying speed.
Set into the top of the dorsal fin was a recessed platform. At the bottom of the platform was a black well of a hole that led further down into the fin.
At the bottom of this well, a rusty wheel turned and creaked. A crescent moon of red light split the black well bottom and widened into a perfect circle as a hatch lifted open. The shadow of a small figure climbed through it and up a short metal ladder to stand upright on the recessed deck platform. This smaller first shadow was followed by another much larger shadow. Both figures looked around at the darkness. A darkness of pitch, except for the red glow rising dimly from below their feet. They leaned forward and rested against the fairing. The smaller figure made some gestures to the darkness, and a match light glowed against the end of a stubby roll of tobacco.
The glowing coal swept a thin line in front of them as an arm opened to the darkness. The figure next to her, dwarfing her in size, just nodded. There was no need to describe the all-consuming blackness aloud.
The giant figure slowly pulled his fingers through his thick beard. “Perfect night for a surface run.”
“Perfect night for contemplating your doom, Hemi,” said the smaller figure.
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“If darkness stirs up feelings of doom, then wear your doom like a blanket.”
“It’s probably best if you keep your imaginative comparisons to yourself. After all, a blanket is for warmth — our doom is unlikely to be very warm.”
“Perhaps so.” Hemi paused breathing in the dense smell of the burning tobacco; there was no reason to rush anything this night. “The usual plan for tonight then?”
“Same as every other fucking night. Charge up the batteries — run on the surface ’til the light cracks the sky, and then we’ll disappear back where we came from. Make sure you keep those pissants at the controls awake though.”
Hemi put one huge hand on her shoulder and turned to climb down through the hatch. She pulled on her cigarillo and the coal at the tip glowed in the darkness. Her doom would probably eventually be a doom of freezing water, she knew that, but at least tonight it was warm enough to be out in the open, up on the top of her boat. The blackness lay on it, and she did indeed find some comfort in that: nobody could see them. If she controlled all the levers of the universe, her vessel would never be seen.
Captain Sylvia Percy stayed on the bridge of her submarine’s sail for hours, smoking her way through one cigarillo after another and watching the empty nothingness go by while her thoughts spiraled outward without direction. For a long time she was surrounded by an environment disturbingly deprived of sensory input. The diesel engines were loud enough, but unvarying. So too the vibration that the engines sent up through the steel-grated deck to shake the worn rubber of her boot soles without change in frequency or amplitude. The blackness around her was limitless, though the boat pushed relentlessly forward. It occurred to Percy that when her boat, the Prospect, was submerged this is what it must be like outside: featureless dark. It felt like she had loosed the bonds of her corporal body and had floated beyond it, so she could experience what her boat was like when it was pushing through the icy blackness of an alien world where the pressure would collapse any body that had evolved for comfort on the surface into a unrecognizable pulp of hemoglobin and fats.
As with many things that seem interminable, the slow but persistent forward motion eventually forced the dome of clouds to relent. The submarine pushed through to crawl out under a sky of stars and a weak, low moon. Captain Percy could now see her hand holding her latest cigarillo, and the long shadow of the Prospect stretching out ahead, parting the waters to allow her to pass as she rode astride this beast of hers. This was a pure and rare pleasure on a submarine, where she spent the vast majority of her time in a steel tube, staring at the same set of dials, with few opportunities to focus her eyes on anything beyond a meter in front of her.
Percy knew her boat well. She had spent enough time with it to have internalized its movements. She almost always knew what the boat was doing just by the feeling of it — the angle of the deck, the vibrations of the engines or the electric motors, the subtle changes to the pressure of the air. Even at depth — when the hull and struts of the boat groaned under the weight of the water above — to her the sounds of the boat under pressure felt like the normal sounds of a huge human taking a great weight onto its shoulders. The only time she ever worried was when the Prospect conveyed sounds or motions, or some other input, that she could not recognize. She had been through so much with this boat that it was only when it did something new that she got scared.
It was when the Prospect had moved fully out from under the clouds, and everything was lit to a dull blue by the moon, that she felt something new. A collection of haptic feedback to her senses made panic rise in her chest. The boat shuddered, as if the cold water it swam through all these years had finally chilled its core.
Percy was thrown violently against the fairing.
She immediately dropped to her knees on the deck of the bridge, pushed her short fingers through the gaps in the steel grating, and gripped. She stuck her head over the hatch hole and looked down to see Hemi’s large face looking up at her from a couple of deck-heights below.
“I don’t know!” he yelled before she could ask. She could hear him haranguing the deck crew to kill the diesel engines and reverse the propellers.
The bow of the Prospect had come to a dead stop, but the stern still had forward motion. Percy could feel the whole boat turning unnaturally around its center axis, like part of an experiment by some precocious child: a magnetized pin through a cork floating in a bowl of water, pulled around by the invisible forces of a planetary aura.
The deck under her began to lean to the starboard side. Percy propped one foot against the inside of the bridge well wall. The boat listed sickeningly. She got to her feet, still braced against the angle of the boat. The pads of her fingers gripped the sharp rusted edges of the fairing, and she peered out over it into the night, scanning for what they had hit. The water to the starboard side remained black and calm, though not quite as glassy as it had been earlier in the night. They were far from shore, in fairly well-charted though little-trafficked waters. The Prospect had clearly run into something at full surface speed, but there should have been nothing to hit here.
For a few moments the boat hung at an angle with no motion and all potential. And then it began to right itself, tilting slowly back towards the port side. As the edge of the fairing came down, Percy could see more of the sea off to port, and there appeared the shadowed silhouette of another submarine.
The bow of the other boat rose up out of the water first, revealing one of the rarest things seen on a modern submarine: a distinguishing feature. The bow had a jagged point that swept back in long sharp blades to merge incongruously into the soft curves of the submarine’s hull. Curved teeth sprouted all along the blades, and these had been reinforced with welded crossbars in many more places than could possibly be necessary. A medieval-looking device intended for ramming ships. Percy had never seen anything like it. It must be both a noisy and inefficient thing for a sub to push through the water ahead of it. Efficiency and quiet were normally the top priorities for a submarine’s design.
Behind the snags of the bow ram came the smoothly swelling curve of a black military submarine. It came up from the surface with water streaming slickly down its sides. The sail rose above with dive planes mounted to it, sticking out like small wings and set at an angle to raise the sub quickly. When the stern finally broke the surface, it was mere meters away from Percy, its swirling wake washing white up against the side of the Prospect.
“Might be our fucking doom a lot sooner than we anticipated,” Percy said to herself as she climbed down through the hatch and the red crescent of light waned out of existence behind her.